Kymab

Based on the Babraham Research Campus near Cambridge, Kymab is a quickly growing company discovering and developing fully human monoclonal antibody therapeutics.

Bridge Partners has been working with Kymab’s bioinformatics and developer staff since February 2011, as its dedicated IT support service. Kymab needs technology that enables easy growth, so we ensure it has suitable systems in place at every stage of its expansion.

As well as providing ongoing support services, we built an infrastructure that has enabled Kymab to grow painlessly from 10 to 160 staff since 2011. At the system’s core is a virtualised platform sitting on centralised tiered storage, which allows Kymab to add servers as required, without significant additional expense. All systems are backed up locally and off-site, providing reliable disaster recovery options.

Bridge Partners chose virtualisation since it allows multiple servers to run on a single hardware platform, and, although initial set up costs may be a little higher, new servers can be built and added to the network without the need to purchase new hardware.

As more physical servers are added, centralised storage makes recovery from a server failure very fast and, in some cases, instant. Centralised storage also allows for easy expansion of space as Kymab develops.

Introducing tiered storage allows Kymab to manage costs and get maximum value from the investment in storage by placing data in appropriate tiers.

In 2014 the firm exceeded capacity in its old office and asked Bridge Partners to plan and manage the transfer of IT systems and staff to a new site.

Since then we have worked closely with Kymab to develop the IT systems in parallel with the company’s growth and to meet the requirements that come with increased staff numbers and data management.

A key area of growth has been within the bioinformatics technology and Bridge Partners have implemented multiple projects supporting the sequencing, processing and management of bioinformatics data.

Through our strategic relationship with Kymab we look forward to finding new solutions to the challenges ahead. Our strategic IT plan will ensure decisions regarding upgrades or replacements are made with the end goal in mind, and it will be constantly refreshed in line with changes at the firm.

We continually work with third party suppliers to ensure that the relevant scientific IT platforms are in place and maintained.